Apple updates iPhoto and Apperature for Retina Display and unifies there library!

MacStories has the story on this one. Apple has updated Aperture to 3.3 and iPhoto to 9.3 which not only give them a Retina Display for the new MacBook Pro, but also unify their libraries, so you can make modifications in either program without having to duplicate the images! This is so very cool! If only they would allow third parties to also do this so Lightroom could do the same, but that will never happen! Still this makes Aperature so much more usefull! Very very cool!

Of course it also means programs like iPhoto Library Manager will need to be updated for this new update to work properly, but still this is a very exciting new feature.

Apple has slightly updated the MacPro

9 to 5 Mac is reporting that in fact Apple has slightly updated the MacPro towers with new Processors, but no Thunderbolt, no USB 3 and no new Graphics cards. This actually makes me more worried that they are killing the MacPro, because who wants a MacPro with so little upgrade? I mean the new processors are nice, but come on. And not only that they are still 2 year old processors, not the latest Xeon’s Intel has released, so while they 12 core is $1200 cheaper than it used to be, it is still old tech.

And if the MacBook’s get NVIDIA graphics cards, why not the MacPro? We want CUDA as well, not the same 2 year old graphics card!

This is not an upgrade. It is a little FU to all us power users!

COME ON APPLE, WTF!

New MacBook Pros

Apple has the pages up on the new MacBook pros.

The MacBook Pro with Retina Display, and the new 13 and 15″ MacBook Pros with the old encloses and Optical Drives.

I am still not sure about SSD as it is just too small. Especially if I am moving to a laptop as my main machine for e-mail and documents and a tower for editing. The worst part is my music and video library is almost a terrabyte itself, so there is no way that could make it on a laptop!

Well, not like I can afford anything new right now, but it does look like Windows will be in my future!

No MacPro announced at the WWDC

Now they could be releasing it and not announcing it, but that seems unlikely. Looks like Apple may in fact be killing the MacPro all together. And while I would love a Retina display MacBook Pro, it looks like my next editing machine will be a Windows machine. As I can get better graphics cards and have more room for storage. I never wanted to have to move to windows, but if Apple is really putting the MacPro out to pasture I will have no option but to move away from the Macs that I love and get a windows machine. Maybe if we make enough money I can get a laptop to be my personal computer and have the tower just for editing, but will need to make a lot more money first! SHIT!

Apple WWDC News

So far there is a new MacBook Air which is faster and faster MacBook Pro 13 and 15″ models and the 15″ gets an NVIDIA GeForce 650M, so say hello to Mercury playback from Adobe, nice.

And a new MacBook Pro, which is super thin, but not like an Air and has a Retina Display. Only .71 inches thick and only 4.46 pounds, lighter than current 13″ MacBook Pro, and it has a 15.4 inch screen, with a 200 ppi pixel density or 5,184,00 pixels! No Optical drive in this model of course. And an updated version of lion with Safari, iMovie, iPhoto made for Retina, as well the pro-apps including Aperature and Final Cut Pro X (yipee fucking do), though being able to see full 1080p in the viewing window is pretty cool, but must take a serious video card! And Photoshop has been updated (or will be soon). Yup it has a GeForce GT 650M with 1 GB of Video Ram. Nice! And up to 768GB of internal flash storage. And up to 7 hours of battery life (that screen has to be a major draw on power). For ports it has SD card, HDMI, USB3 and 2, Magsafe 2, 2 thunderbolt ports and headphone.

It seems the magsafe has been made thinner, nice!

And Firewire 800 and gigabit ethernet adapters for thunderbolt, though I would rather have the ports!

And no word on the 17″ MacBook Pro so it is likely EOL.

Uh Oh, now OS X, does that mean no MacPro. I sure hope not!

Onto Mountain Lion. And 8 new features.

•iCloud built in. With Apps updated for iCloud, so your documents can live in the cloud (hurray can we use Pages docs with iPad and Pages on the Mac? Looks like it ). And a final version of messages for the Mac, which will also send SMS (How does that work, do you pay via your phone?).

•Notification Center, banners are top right (just like Growl) or can slide notification center our from right. And can support from other services like Twitter.

•Dictation to the Mac. Probably need something to replace my old iSight though!

•Sharing, now built in to share to twitter from everywhere, and an SDK for any app to support it.

•New Safari, unified top search and url bar like Chrome. Share tabs across iCloud to mac and iOS, and can see what tabs you have open in what place. And Visual Tab View.

•Power Nap. Keeps Mac up to date while it sleeps, fetching e-mail and keeping track of calenders. Still backup to time capsule, download from app store and automatic software updates, and doesn’t spin up fans and goes easy on battery.

•Airplay mirroring, display your mac onto your TV with an Apple TV and up to 1080 content (how does that work with the new retina display?).

•Game Center makes it to the Mac. Can even play Mac to iOS on certain games.

And Mountain Lion is released next Month for only $19.99! WOW! And that is from Lion and Snow Leopard! And one purchase will do all your personal macs! That rocks!

Now iOS 6. 200 New Features.

•Significant enhancements to Siri, including partnering with Open Table and Yelp. And working with car manufactures to add a siri button to cars! Now that is cool! BMW, GM, Jaguar Mercedes, Honda, Land Rover, Audi, Toyota!

•Integrated Facebook like Twitter before it with public API.

•Phone App enhancements. Can reply with message or add reminder to call back later!

•Do Not distrub, to get no notifications, or allow it to ring for only certain numbers. Or let a second call from someone though.

•Facetime has been enable over cellular. And unifiying phone number and apple iD, so it will work with mac or iPad and the same with iMessage.

•You can upload photos in Safari

•Smart App Banners to let people know of native apps in App Store

•Photo Stream adds sharing and can comment on photos of friends

•Mail adds VIP, really important people, want to be notified, new mailbox, and a flagged mailbox.

•Mail can add photos from compose window.

•Passbook, looks like a replacement for SplashID and 1Password. Also has location based allerts and can load things like your movie ticket on the window. Airline tickets, Fandago Tickets, Store Card from Starbucks, coupons for Target, express hotel check in and all integrated with Lock Screen. Sounds very cool.

•Accessiblity. There is guided access, lets you lock out controls you don’t want kids to be able to access. Single App Mode. Can lock things up so students can’t leave the app to get answers.

•Maps. Yup, rumors were right, they are doing it all themselves, no more Google Maps. What does this mean for traffic? Adding local search. Ah, new traffic view added, shows incidents. All crowd sourced traffic from other iOS phones. Built in turn by turn navigation. With an ETA based on traffic. Integrated with siri and works on lock screen. Siri can give time estimates.

•Flyovers for Maps with 3D photographic models. Maps are all vector based. Can rotate and zoom labels, zoom in far enough buildings appear. And satellite view in 3D. Can change camera angles. Adaptive cinematic camera angles.

•Maps, siri can read out directions and give an eta.

•Maps get an overview at any time and just tap to resume turn by turn directions.

•Mail has per account signatures! Nice!

•Lost Mode where you can send a phone number to that phone and someone who finds it can tap it and call you back.

•iOS 6 will ship this fall and goes to beta developers today.

NO NEW MACPRO! WTF! Either the rumors were wrong or they didn’t bother announcing it.

iCloud and the dumbing of Apple Products

For years I have lamented the dumbing down of Apple products for the masses, especially when OS X is build on the so powerful UNIX operating system, but it has certainly gotten much worse of late. Just look at Lion. It now hides you Library folder where all preferences and other user system files are stored, and it even password protects your Utilities folder. This may be fine for an average user, but for a power user they are just frustrations that add steps to the normal things we do every day, but that is not the worst of it. The worst part is when they dumb something down too much and it doesn’t function right. It is not like Apple has good customer support, unless you want to go into an Apple store, and I am not brining in my tower, ipad and iPhone to get iCloud to work right!

A little explanation is necessary here, but I use both Firefox and Google Chrome as my primary browsers, not Safari, but I do have an iPhone and iPad, and like them to have the same bookmarks as my main browsers, so I use X-Marks to sync my bookmarks between all browsers, but recently it stopped syncing my bookmarks correctly to my iPhone and iPad. I looked on Apple’s forums, and tried all sorts of methods to clear my bookmarks off of iCloud, which seam to have become corrupt, but nothing seems to work. With iSync you could always set to overwrite the bookmarks in the cloud, because these things happen (and you can do it in X-Marks), but they have dumbed down iCloud to the point where it has basically zero controls, so when something like this happens you are just SOL!

And I already had to give up cloud syncing for my iPad and iPhone as when I moved from my trusty iPad 1 to my the New iPad, I tried syncing my iPad from the cloud and it basically hung every time, and I had to revert to my last backup from iTunes, which was 4 months old, but at least that worked. Now I don’t trust iCloud at all, and use iTunes to backup and sync bookmarks as that actually seems to work with some consistency (though don’t even get me started on how old and out of date iTunes is).

Now unfortunately iCloud is completely useless to me as it is broken on two fronts, and I have no way to reset things in the cloud to make them better. No way to see those files, or delete them and start over. Maybe if I went into an Apple store I could get them to do it, but honestly I don’t have time. And for files i have moved away from the now defunct Mobile me to services from SugarSync, DropBox and Box.net as they work and won’t have features pulled as I continue to use them, only get better.

I have been an Apple man for years and years, since I was a little kid and got an Apple IIC, but really the company is making many stupid decisions and I think a lot of them will end up biting them on the ass, like the whole killing Final Cut Pro 7 thing. I continue to like Apple products, have have never been a fan of windows, but have been considering getting a windows machine to edit and do graphics on, and possibly that will mean that my only Apple products are my iPhone and iPad, and the computers I so loved will no longer matter to me, but I sure hope that doesn’t happen.

Apple you are not perfect and your products are not either, please restore a modicum of control to us users to fix thing when they do have issues.

Larry Jordan on Adobe Prelude

Larry Jordan has an excellent article on the new Adobe Prelude CS6 for ingesting and logging footage.

I knew it was for logging and even cutting a rough assembly, but didn’t realize it could export to either Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro 7. Very cool.

And it sounds like the biggest issue is the lack of ProRES presets for Media Encorder, which I always found odd, but not hard to create for oneself.

Larry also offers a complete 2 hour tutorial on how to use Prelude at his site.